DAY 95. Rodrigo Lara Mesquita

Journalist (report, copydesk and editor) with background in history working around information technologies and new possibilities of interaction between the public and with the public since 1988.

In 1988, I assumed the director-general of the Agência Estado and developed the project Broadcast, a leading Brazilian market of real time information for the financial market since 92> goal > turn it into cash to attack (invest on) the base of the pyramid of the Brazilian economy > SMEs > sectors of industry and services and agribusiness.

In relation to the contemporary world, I see a crossroads when I think of Brazil. We are the eighth economy in the world, there has been a significant social ascension process since Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s government ended with the perverse inflationary process, which we lived with for dozens of years, and gave grounds for the economy. Lula and his successor, Dilma, were benefited with that and expanded the social policies, but despised the obligation to continue the necessary reforms to achieve organic growth. And all Brazilians are paying for it, as it became clear during the demonstrations and protests throughout the country this July.

Is there any paradigm, any vision for humanity?

alvin toffler

I understand we live a global crisis. The national State, the political parties, the institutions that govern the global relations got old to the challenges that we will face ahead. The globalization, Nicholas Negroponte used to say years ago, emphasizes above all the “glocal” (global + local). And he argued: “Today, the trend is obvious from the Internet to change the role that people exercise, combining the separation between seller and consumer, between publisher and reader. All digital things are large and small at the same time – a paradox, not a contradiction. Decentralized networks will replace hierarchies and central controls will be replaced by self-organizing systems that will seem much more with the relationship between man and nature than with institutional relations.

The culture, and the consequent social, political, and economic organization dominant in the contemporary society, is still the one that started at the 16th century, when a set of technological innovations in a favorable historical context contributed to the beginning of the burial of the old Regime, in which the Earth was at the center of the universe, the social order was immutable and the Church, along with the absolutist power, had the monopoly of information.

The Gutenberg’s press was among the technological innovations that have contributed to the rise of the bourgeois world. And its main products – the book and the newspaper – have been understood for many years by the dominant order as subversive tools. This subversion nurtured and created the world in which we live. A world where social inequity still bothers and scares, but in which all barriers to the generation of wealth and knowledge were torn down, in a process which also generated a wave of innovation that we are living and the possibility to take the next leap.

For the first time in history since the industrial revolution, as Yochai Benkler notes, the basic means of creating information, knowledge and culture are in the hands of the majority of the world population. In recent years there has been a radical decentralization of these means. With that, we had a radical decentralization of innovation processes, a great decentralization of creativity, a radical decentralization of democratic participation. You no longer need to own a newspaper or a radio or be part of the “fortunate ones” to participate in politics, as Yochai Benkler says.

The tremendous and revolutionary impacts of the Internet on society

yochai benkler

It is this context that makes me optimistic about a future that I will not see. And I’m especially optimistic about Brazil. We are a continental country, we suffered colonization from all parts of the world and we knew how to open ourselves to this process mixing races and cultures in a reasonably harmonious manner. We live in big cities, which are in the eye of the hurricane, tense with the beginning of this revolution promoted by the internet, the web, the network. We are tense with the immaturity of the process and the conflict between the new and the old, between the industrial economy and the new economy, which so far destroys jobs on the factory floor and now in sectors that use intelligence: journalism, medicine, law, education, etc.

But if the process is not terminated or delayed by telecommunication companies, that has a monopoly on access to the new infrastructure of society, we will certainly create a new world, with new foundations and references on the capital-work relation, new foundations and references on political processes, new foundations and references on production processes of information, knowledge, culture, consumer goods and wealth.

Brazil is not an aged continent looking at its past, it is not the Asian countries disciplined by misery and it is not the countries from North America stressed for dozens of years leading the industrial revolution and its innovation process, which fostered and built the infrastructure of the future: the internet, the web, the network. It is in the small cities in the interior of Brazil, in the wilds of the many regions of native forests and in our hinterlands that are the roots of the Brazilians. When all is inserted in the knowledge society and participating in the process, we will offer the world a new world, transforming and reinvigorating the “brand Brazil” and how they see us out there (abroad), in a world in which nationalism will tend to disappear.

Brazil of the confines, the peripheries, the small towns

ditão virgílio, o saci e as chuvas.

They are simple people who work their day to day without the infinite perspectives of the centers of the world. They, the inhabitants of the suburbs, small towns, the communities of the Amazon, the native population, the Indians, most Brazilians will add other values and their moods to the institutional processes of our society. It will be a more open, fluid and oxygenated world. And the “brand Brazil” will reflect its people, with its colorful, with its folklore, with its music, with its diverse culture, its heavenly beaches, its mysterious forests. With friendliness, with willingness to live with the controversial, its hopes and frustrations: the “brand Brazil” of the Confines.